Thanks to the Studio Summer Fellowship, I have had a deeply meaningful scholarly experience and learned four lessons about digital work in the academy.

 

 

Lesson 1: Value Process Over Product

My intention at the start of this summer was to build a map that visualized the recent history of the public higher education system in Kosovo. The digital product has become a reality, but that was not the greatest accomplishment of this journey. This experience protected my time to conduct research deeply, with invaluable dedicated hours to focus on process over product. As a result of this experience, I explored these data in a closer, richer way than ever before. By learning cartographic methods, I spotted trends that no table or graph generated from these data previously helped me to see. Most importantly, I developed confidence as a scholar, which will enhance my research and teaching.

Lesson 2: Welcome Creativity

When I began the project, I had an idea in my mind of how the completed map should look. After the first few weeks, the initial visualization started to resemble the image in my head, but the story that the data told lacked boldness. My Studio mentor, GIS Specialist Jay Bowen, suggested that instead of sticking with just the choropleth map, we could experiment with a creative representation of the data using proportional circles. After deviating from the initial vision, one of the important trends that was too subtle in the first draft became clear and compelling in the final version.

Lesson 3: Expect the Unexpected

During the weekly Fellows class, Dr. Stephanie Blalock asked us to reflect upon what surprised us during this experience. For me, the surprise was the accumulation of moments where I braced in anticipation of rough technological challenges but encountered support instead of roadblocks. These moments of relief outnumbered instances where I faced unexpected challenges. For example, I was really surprised when a rough map of Kosovo and all its municipalities appeared on my monitor for the first time after just a week. I thought that generating an image would take all summer! In the weeks that followed, each little map detail afforded the opportunity for custom design, and I had not expected that tailoring the map would involve just a bit of HTML or JavaScript, rather than some complicated procedure using the QGIS map-making software. The collective surprise of all these little a-ha moments made the experience immensely more satisfying, demystified the technology, and made the challenges that did emerge seem miniscule.

Lesson 4: Design with the Future in Mind

In reaching the final stage of the summer project timeline, the map does a decent job showing what is happening with public higher education but not why. Thus, the project cannot end in its current state. Realizing that I am running out of protected summer work time, I have made design choices that are suitable for scholarly presentation of data when our class of Studio Fellows presents at the 2021 Jakobsen Conference and that can accommodate future features about quality assurance policies in Kosovo when I am able to return to the project as a Public Digital Humanities Certificate capstone.

 

If you would like to get in touch with me about this research, the best way to reach me is by email at nicholas-stroup@uiowa.edu.

 

–Nicholas Stroup

Can higher education access and higher education quality be improved at the same time? How can we visualize this difficult trade-off?

For the Studio summer fellowship, my technological goal is to learn how to build a choropleth map that includes a time slider element. The reason I want to learn this skill is to tell the story of the rapid enrollment changes at public universities in Kosovo. 

At the start of the 2010s, as a measure to improve quality of higher education institutions, the Republic of Kosovo passed a regulation that effectively required that universities must employ three PhD-holders for each accredited degree program [1][2]. If a university could not maintain this requirement, the noncomplying program would lose accreditation and be prohibited from enrolling new students. For a country that founded its first university in 1970s, whose people experienced segregation and systematic exclusion from formal education in the 1980s, that faced war in the 1990s, and formally declared independence in the 2000s, there has not been much opportunity to build the quality national educational infrastructure required to mint new PhDs in Kosovo. As such, the three-PhD quality assurance requirement led to the dis-accreditation of degree programs around the country. While we have some idea of what this quality assurance policy has meant for the degree programs, what has this meant for students – or potential students – across Kosovo?

As a student at Iowa, I feel a deep connection to Kosovo. Iowa and Kosovo have a Sister State relationship, Kosovo was the first country to open a foreign consulate in Iowa, and the connections between sectors in our two states offer a unique approach for post-conflict development work. Given the young population of Kosovo (the median age is 30.5) and the labor market issues young Kosovars face (youth unemployment rate presently at 49.4%), the work of understanding how higher education serves today’s students in Kosovo is an urgent matter [3][4]. Mobilizing the resources of the University of Iowa through this fellowship seems like a small way I can contribute to developing this understanding.

In just the initial weeks of the project, with the skillful guidance of GIS Specialist Jay Bowen, I have already learned some technical vocabulary (like the word ‘choropleth’!) and acquired several digital tools to make a rudimentary map to help tell this story. Over the course of the upcoming weeks, I hope to polish this map into a format that can be useful for educational leaders in Kosovo seeking to improve both quality and access in the new nation.

-Nick Stroup

 

References

[1] Ministry of Education, Science and Technology. (2013). Administrative instruction: No. 0212013 for accreditation of higher education institutions in the republic of Kosova. MEST website: https://masht.rks-gov.net/uploads/2016/01/02-2013-ua-mbi-akreditimin-e-institucioneve.pdf

[2] National Qualification Authority. (2016). EQF referencing report of the Kosovo national qualification framework for general education, VET, and higher education. National Qualification Authority website: https://akkks.rks-gov.net/uploads/kosovo_eqf_referencing_report_2016.pdf

[3] Central Intelligence Agency. (2020). Kosovo. In The world factbook. CIA website: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/kv.html

[4] Kosovo Agency of Statistics. (2020). Labor force survey in Kosovo, 2019. Kosovo Agency of Statistics website: https://ask.rks-gov.net/en/kosovo-agency-of-statistics/add-news/labor-force-survey-in-kosovo-2019